Slashdot Mirror
Should Google Go Nuclear?
Baldrson writes "One of the founders of the US Tokamak fusion program, Dr. Robert W. Bussard, gave a lecture at Google recently now appearing as a Google video titled 'Should Google Go Nuclear?'. In it, he presents his recent breakthrough electrostatic confinement fusion device which, he claims, produced several orders of magnitude higher fusion power than earlier electrostatic confinement devices. According to Bussard, it did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation. He's looking for $200M funding, the first million or so of which goes to rebuilding a more robust demonstrator within the first year. He claims the scaling laws are so favorable that the initial full scale reactor would burn boron-11 — the cleanest fusion reaction otherwise unattainable. He has some fairly disturbing things to say in this video, as well as elsewhere, about the US fusion program which he co-founded."
If Google pursues this, I don't think they'll do so for financial reasons, but rather for PR reasons (just like they used the installation of a relatively large solar capacity as PR). But nowadays $200 Million isn't that much to Google, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them support the effort to some extent.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than Iran or North Korea.
Obligatory science fiction refernce: Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned"
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I watched the google video link of the presentation for a bit to just be sure - and - he does say fusion. I thought that fusion was perpetually 20 years off? If it's fusion, this will be the most important breakthrough in decades. Clean power without all that nasty global warming consequences.
Shh.
I wonder if it'll have an "I feel lucky" button...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
" The Bussard ramjet method of spacecraft propulsion was proposed in 1960 by the physicist Robert W. Bussard and popularized by Carl Sagan in the television series and subsequent book Cosmos as a variant of a fusion rocket capable of fast interstellar spaceflight. It would use a large scoop (on the order of kilometers in diameter) to compress hydrogen from the interstellar medium and fuse it. This mass would then form the exhaust of a rocket to accelerate the ramjet." - from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
My friend's father is one of the guys responsible for Bussard's (now-dwindling) Navy funding. The few million he got for his first reactors came from them. From what I've heard from him, Bussard is really onto something with his devices. Now, I've never met him myself, nor do I have enough physics under my belt yet to be able to critique the device, but it does sound pretty reasonable.
About the $200 mil, apparently the power output of these scales as something like the 7th or 9th power of the radius of the device (don't quote me on these numbers), so while the prototypes tested so far produce piddling amounts of power, not nearly break-even, they supposedly confirmed the principles, and the $200 mil model should be big enough to be power-positive. I really hope Google decides to sponsor this. I mean, if they can spend $1.6b on Youtube, what's $200m?
Dr. Robert W. Bussard
Is this the same dude of Bussard Collector fame? Sweet.
I can now officially have fantasies of being on a space faring hotel, with women wearing skin tight costumes...
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
The Bussard Ramjet is one of the finest pieces of Pseudo scientific speculation ever dreamed of and integrated into Science Fiction works. It is simple and elegant in concept, a machine that in theory would make interstellar travel easier than ever, but in reality unworkable. The Bussard Ramjet is a dream that cannot be.
Mr. Bussard is a dreamer, and his ideas are beautiful; Star Trek has named a large component of its star ships after Bussard. His fertile imagination leads to great science fiction. Even the Great Carl Sagan was inspired by the beautiful mind of Bussard the dreamer.
I too like Mr. Bussard a great deal, and respect and admire his numerous contributions to our culture and to science fiction. However, it has become clear to me that Mr. Bussard no longer is the man he once was. He, most unfortunately, appears to have become senile, vindictive and single-minded to the point of blindness; read what he says, how he defends his project while attacking all other research constantly.
Mr. Bussard today has become a pseudo scientific hack, a charlatan if you will. He has become a quack who is attempting to prove the magical results of his form of fusion while all other scientists deny his conclusions, and he repeat "Give me 200M$!" as the sole refrain of his incessant groveling for cash.
It saddens me to see that Mr. Bussard has chosen to challenge James Randi and every scientific skeptic on earth. Mr. Bussard has never been able to reproduce any of his results in front of impartial peers, under controlled conditions. Read his letter on JREF, and see for yourself.
Mr. Bussard claims to have tested his device a few times and achieved success, but whenever he tried to test it under controlled conditions, it failed - and he blamed some obscure technical malfunction for this inability to achieve any measurable results. Then he says that only by having 200M$ can he show that his techniques work - he will not rebuild his original demonstration machine, nor allow anybody to do so.
According to Mr. Bussard, it is easy to test for the proper operation of his machine, hence confirming that scaling the machine up in a 200M$ version would produce lots and lots of energy. However, he refuses to construct such a workable prototype and have it tested by independent experts.
Read it for yourself and tell me this man is rational.
Yes, the oil companies will use their corporate death squads to make this disappear. I would guess that someone has fucked up their energy balance and no evil corporate death squads will need to be deployed. If it is real, I imagine the 3v1L corporations will fight this off roughly as well as the horse buggy makers fought off the car.
Oh this is a bad idea - when skyn^H^H Google becomes fully self-aware - it's going to have it's own incredible power source?!
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
Brings new and interesting meanings to the concept of googlebombing :-)
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
If producing energy via nuclear fusion is cheaper than extracting oil, then the oil companies are going to be to do diddley squat to stop it. If on the other hand it cost more than oil, then fusion has got a problem.
I will also point out that nuclear fusion isn't going to be a hundred percent clean process. There will be some radioactive by products. Just not anywhere on the scale of nuclear fission.
Yes. If $20 billion made a real fusion project, every oil company would be killing each other to get in on it. The ROI on that project is immense, and their shares and options would go through the roof. Not to mention the positive publicity...
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
He is supposed to be the founder of a "Energy Matter Conversion Corporation", but I cannot find a website of the company. Are there still technology companies without a website out there? In this field? Physicists started the whole www.
Won't effect their markets dramatically (you won't be putting one of these in your car; you won't be getting an electric car either if gas prices remain reasonable; you won't be using it as stock for plastics; etc.).
They'll suddenly appear on the scene as Big Boron anyway.
And it's a nice little side effect of 'pacifying' Turkey. Yes, that's right, more than half of the world's reserves are in the Middle East. If we could only find a way to run a turbine off of corporate hot air we could lead the world in power production.
KFG
Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than Iran or North Korea.
That depends on whether an MAD scenario with Microsoft would increase shareholder value.
Karma: Oldschool
In addition, there are 101 references for "Electrostatic Confinement Fusion."
Shane ;)
(yes, I'm shamelessly publishing links to my servers for all the Slashdot community to hit. After all, they have to have some reason to keep me employed!
Mr. Fusion?
Oh get off it. First of all, oil companies are already quite secure in their profits. Oil's used for a hell of a lot more than just electricity. Everything plastic, for example.
Also, oil companies are some of the ones leading the alternative energy charge, believe it or not. Oil companies know even better than you do that their oil wells are not going to last forever, and they want to be ready when they do start drying up by already being leaders in the next power resource. They are generally not stupid nor abnormally immoral. They do want to make a buck, but they are good at thinking long-term.
(Note: I am talking about most large oil companies other than Exxon/Mobil. Those guys in particular seem a little on the retarded side.)
Random and weird software I've written.
What's several orders of magnitude more than 0?
Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than the USA.
:)
Here, I fixed it for you. You're welcome
Syllable 0.62 is here at last!!!
I'm no physicist, but in the video he outlines 3 reactions in particular that would be perferable for fusion. one reaction in particular would be clean,(it was a long video and i couldn't read the slides so some of this might be incorect) producing no neutrons. this is the pb (proton/boron) reaction, which only produces helium atoms
What are the rules in the USofA regarding corporate nuclear reactors?
Actually it would be pretty interesting to hear about such laws in other countries as well.
Roger Ramjet is his name,
Hero of our Nation,
Every time he has a wank,
He calls it masturbation.
I can't for the life of me remember what the proper words should be.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Try making plastic, nylon, lubricants, jet-engine fuel from deuterium.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Soo... there's the old adage that big claims need big evidence, and Bussard currently has rather an excess of one and a lack of the other. but for someone who chooses to discredit him for not being a bit short on concrete, verifiable data, your post itself is completely science free. In a discussion that is entirely dependant on science (his last prototype's malfunction is unfortunate and perhaps suspicious, but is by no means proof of hackery), I don't understand why people find what amounts to an emotional evaluation of his work useful.
Your criticisms are mostly ad hominem, e.g. his "Incessant groveling for cash" - he does not grovel incessantly, in fact in the Google lecture he admits to giving up on the search for funding. Should he have just packed his bags when his funding was cut (it should be noted that it was all navy energy research funding, not him in particular)? He also defends the malfunction quite reasonably (it was one not a series as you suggest), and considering the supposedly successful prototype was only tested a few times at useful power levels, small amounts of data are also not unreasonable.
If he's a quack, so be it. But let's actually add to the debate by citing facts, not armchair opinions that essentially a love of science fiction == hack (Remember how people used to dream about a better and wonderful future? That used to actually be a fairly american quality and he is of that generation).
I don't try and discredit ID proponents just by calling them assholes. I point to the fact that it is a scientifically sterile non-theory and that there is a wide body of evidence supporting evolution. He wasn't working alone in his basement, he had a pretty impressive team (Jim Benson immedialely hired them after funding dissapeared) that would have complained publicly if he was lying about his results. Treat his science as you would any other, and fight it with evidence, or restrain your tongue.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
00000
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I do wish his ... "invention" destroys morons instead of borons. The planet gets a clean source of energy for handful of ... less desirables.
If you want to prove that you're not full of it why not rebuild the last machine you built, which would be relatively cheap, to recreate the results you got the day before you had to close the labs down?
- Well the $200M will build ones which will be 50x better, one of them will be a dodecahedron.
Why is no-one funding you?
- No-one thinks outside the box. If you let me choose who goes on the panel who gets to decide whether it's worthwhile I'll pick some people who can think outside the box. There are lots of people in China and other countries who can think outside the box, and if I don't get funding here in America I'll give my patents to China for free and you wouldn't want that. (I'm not making this up, he literally threatened the audience with giving the tech to China for free)
How do you get the helium waste products out?
- We have a grid on the outside which lets the helium slowly come to a stop, we haven't tried this yet but it's an engineering problem. There are also serious problems with arcing due to the high voltages, but these are merely engineering problems not physics problems.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Good at thinking long term... And this explains the huge investments in nuclear, i.e. fission, power. Or wait, are they investing in stupid PR technologies like windmills? I know when chevron runs adds saying they care and have donated $200 million dollars to finding clean, renewable energy sources it sounds nice and all, but all these large companies have annual revuans in the hundreds of billions (and profits in the 10's) and so thats pretty much just advertising money.
Why would the company leadership care anyway? It's not like they're going to be there when oil becomes unprofitable (Which is long after it becomes scare, for obvious reasons I hope, it becomes more profitable before it becomes less). Don't believe the damn ads. No company, is planning 20 years into the future, particularly not an american company. When they start spending 3 and 5 billion dollars, that will be the indication that they actually care. Until then, its just money to get people like you to like them.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Do not look into the boron with your remaining eye!
liqbase
What if a private person wants to invest? Just normal people with no big money but with an idea that this fusion type should work? What can be done? What we do?
Sure, if $20 billion gave a real fusion project with no risk of failure, they'd be all over it. Large oil companies are typically conservative when it comes to new technologies. It's not that they do not innovate; rather, they tend to focus their money and energy on refinements of well-proven processes.
Are you projecting you inability to understand the subject on this guy?
He looks, walks and talks like an old man, yes. How does that make him a nutcase?
This was a very nice talk, the main problem I had with it it was that I wasn't there to ask questions myself.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
.. than Iran or North Korea or G. W. Bush.
United States has demanded that google opens its nuclear facilities to a team of IAEC inspectors, and is threatening to impose economic sanction if its demand is not met. United States State Department has expressed concerns about google's nuclear program and decline to rule out military option.
the idea about Inertial Electrostatic Confinement did not come from them. Farnsworth (of TV tube fame) and hirsh developed that, but ran into problems with the anode or kathode not being transparent enough. Their invention is to make this electrode with magnets, which is a logical progression.
You might be right tough that he is a kook as I did not hear him addres the biggest problem with IEC: bremsstrahlung. Every time you have to accelerate a ion it will leak some radiation in the form of bremsstarahlung (braking radiation). The ions you want to fuse each have to pass the center of the well a couple of thousand times (depending on density and temperature) just to have the chance to meet another ion close enough for fusion to occur. Pump more energy into it, and more radiation leaks away and you will never be able to break even.
The other thing that is fishy is the strange reason he gave why they did not publish for 11 years. If you don't publish essentially you are not doing science, even after the embargo they did not release the floodgates and publish all the articles they had written over time but could not publish. He is promising a 100+ paper, but appearantly it is not ready yet. WTF? you had 11 for that and one year you knew for certain what situation you'd be in now. On october 1 they sould not have been doing last minute experiments, but been submitting all their articles to every journal respectable enough. They would have had a much better chance to get funding with a couple of influential papers to their name. In science it's publish or perish, and they chose not to publish.
The other countries threat is hollow too: if they had really cared about the subject, they would have had no problem moving to another country just to keep their lab going. He is still here...
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
No matter what you do. Some one some where thinks what your doing is Evil. Some people think Google is Evil because you can search for Porn and Other people this it is evil because it blocks some sites where such sites are illegal in that country. As for a nuclear energy it is an other case of Environmentalist shooting them selves in the foot. If it Ain't Solar, or Wind Energy they will complain, fuss and block that new technology. Nuclear energy is relatively clean where the toxic side effects are actually fairly manageable. But with that small about of toxins released. Environmentalist go Crazy block it. Thus leaving us dependent on Coal, Power plants. The Environmentalist are just as bad as the Bush Administration to the environment. We really need to promote more the moderate Environmentalist groups and Shun the WackJob groups on both sides.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
See the p-B^11 fuel cycle, too.
Moron at eleven.
Bussard mentions arcing as one of their problems and shows data for breakdown voltages of hydrogen, co2, etc.
:-)
I think the electric utilities have settled on using sulfur hexafluoride as the best solution for this issue in high voltage transformers. In spite of the frightening name this gas is actually non-toxic (and if you breathe it you get the opposite of the helium effect because of its high density
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Umm... last time I checked, Google is not the only entity that could give away 200M (or any substantial portion of that sum) without the accountants noticing. And Google is not the only entity that supports technological advancement. In fact, there are thousands upon thousands of such organizations and individuals. Why didn't they suggest it be the Branson Fusion Device(TM)?
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
here's why... (Pops new) We now HAVE an internal arms struggle in this country.
What I mean is if fusion is cheaper than oil then people are going to use it. The oil companies can try to suppress it, but in the end people are going to vote with their feet.
And no oil company/government conspiracy is going to stop them buying cheaper energy.
Bussard should go to Allen and Google about this. Unlike Gates, he has the right idea. He is constantly investing into ideas that are outlandiously expensive, but will payoff high if successful. For example, he was one of the major investors in using Cable for internet. In addition, he funded SS1/WK, and is still a major player with Rutan for chasing the privatization of space. This would be up his alley, combined with perhaps a high speed mag lev.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In the refinery I'm in, about 70% of oil is made into gasoline. Even if we completely stopped using petroleum products to fuel our automobiles and heat our homes, we could still have these glorious products-of-the-future-today and have lower bills and cleaner, greener consciences. Have our nuclear cake and eat it too, so to speak.
Last I heard nuclear reactions are the opposite of fusion reactions. Are they going nuclear or going fusion?
Res publica non dominetur
If it works, they'll buy it
My cousin works for Shell in their overall plant quality team, and back in the early 80's we were discussing the large number of "MPG improvement" additives that you can put in your tank or oil that claim to improve your MPG.
His response: If it really worked, we'd buy it. Anything that could give people a 1-5%+ in MPG means we could charge more per gallon and if it worked we'd be able to take a lion share of the customer base and gasoline is a volume business.
So if there is a new energy source, Big Oil will be backing it to protect their profits.
Why are women so complicated? Find out how little I know here.
"Google Now Officially a Nuclear Power; Microsoft Sets Pants to Brown Alert"
Oldie but goodie.
Last I heard nuclear reactions are the opposite of fusion reactions. Are they going nuclear or going fusion?
No. Fission and fusion reactions are two different kinds of nuclear reactions.
Though you can call them "opposite nuclear reactions" , this would be misleading since both reactions can be a source of energy.
So his "under the radar" funding was cut, because they have reallocated research on how to fight road side bombs. Think this is pretty myopic for government. But then there is free oil in iraq... Priorities are all out of place.
Lately within /. there has been evidence of old physics coming around again, for example the article of transmitted power comes from Tesla theory. Now the elctrostatic fusion device, or fusor is once again being visited. Interesting thing about the fusor... the same underlying technology that makes a CRT television work is the same underlying technology to get the fusor to work.
Or maybe Dr. Bussard is working on another, electrostatic fusion device other than the fusor?
That's simple.
Make oil expensive. All sorts of efficiency improvements and novel energy production methods will become viable. Fusion is frankly irrelevant.
You see people are naturally wasteful. If something is cheap, it's not worth using efficiently and so the overwhelming majority of it is wasted, look at oil, coal, nuclear etc. 60% of the output is thrown away before the electricity even leaves the power plant. Look at the housing, businesses still using single layer glazing, no wall or roof insulation. Open windows with air conditioning etc etc etc. Look at the automobiles, 15% efficient overall, the sales of 15mpg vehicles in the US, the land of cheap oil, the sales of 55mpg vehicles in europe where fuel is far more expensive.
You see, right now, we do in fact live in an incredibly energy rich civilisation. Energy is cheaper now than it has been ever before in human history. It could be cheaper still, almost half the price it is now, less even, simply by becoming more efficient. And we don't bother with that because it's just not worth while becoming more efficient.
So... Fusion is irrelevant, we already have cheap power. Making it cheaper just means people will waste more of it. It's human nature and economics. In that light fusion research gets more than enough funding for what's really a highly speculative investment.
Deleted
That's not quite how it works. If a new fusion technology hit the market, its big competitor would be coal, not oil. Oil is used primarily for gasoline, for cars and fertilizer and plastics and such. So if a fusion plant comes on line, it won't do much to reduce the need for oil until people start building electric cars to take advantage of the cheap power.
The next question you have to consider: what exactly do you mean by "costs more than coal"? Are you including in coal costs the CO2 production, the digging up of mountains to get to the coal, the radioactive materials going out the smokestack? If you forced coal-fired plants to upgrade so that they produced almost no pollution, and forced coal extractors to restore the land after they extracted the coal, what would the cost of coal-based energy be then?
The radioactive "byproducts" of most fusion reactions are neutrons. They take a lot of shielding to contain them, but the joyous thing is that when you turn off the reaction, they're gone. There are no materials that need to be shipped off to Yucca Mountain to be guarded from evil terrorists for the next ten million years.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I disagree. If there seemed like a good chance of success, then sure they'd be interested. But they'd also be competing with dozens of other companies that have no stake in the current power generation infrastructure. Given a competition between one company that can get all that ROI free and clear, and another company that is going to get that ROI, but with the penalty of undermining their current cash cows, who is really going to want it more?
Rationally, the answer should be the oil company. If the Mr. Fusion business takes off, their model is going to be undermined whether or not they're profiting from the new technology. But corporations don't necessarily act rationally; they act the way the CEO tells them to act. So if upper management is convinced that fusion represents a threat, they're probably going to dismiss it and hope it never pans out.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
If this fusion thing were to miraculously work and we did have a new source of energy, we'd be in the exact same place as the current oil crisis... We'd have to mine for boron-11. And since, like all matter on this planet, it is finite in quantity, we'll eventually have to depend on countries like Turkey for our boron. The same goes for the ITER http://www.iter.org/ technology... they need lithium to generate the fuels required by the device, and eventually, we'll run out of lithium. This is complete bullshit. We should be focusing on ways to store electrical energy more efficiently and working towards more efficient solar technologies.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
2,350 hits for search string: "boron fusion" 229 for "boron fusion" funded 8 hits for search string: "boron fusion" funded Bussard & relates to a Wikipedia overview. Wikipedia then speaks of the groups doing this research and development under "Current research" which goes way beyond what Bussard noted in the article. Searching on them can turn up interesting work. Bo
That seems to be a different issue. As I mentioned elsewhere, oil isn't in direct competition with fusion, at least until electric cars get popular. More important, it's one thing to change gasoline in such a way as to make it better than competitors' products. It's another thing to assume that an oil company would happily invest in something that might undermine demand for its products.
Those who think the major players in the oil industry would make economically rational decisions regarding alternative energy are assuming that people are more rational than they really are. A better indicator would be to find out what the oil companies' lobbyists in Washington are actually going around asking for.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Your comments just about sum up all fusion research: inertial confinement, magnetic confinement, etc. No fusion research has demonstrated that it can result in any kind of break-even energy delivery in any real sense, and there are big theoretical gaps in all of them.
Stephen Colbert's persona (the one he uses on The Colbert Report) doesn't equate to someone with a Doctorate. The show isn't called, "Dr. Colbert plays the Devil's Advocate for Haw-Haws." He plays himself as a showboating ass, therein lies the comedy.
You comment on people calling themselves doctors when they aren't medical doctors is asinine. You wouldn't call someone with a PhD in Physics a doctor? How about Mr. Martin Luther King (plagiarism conspiracy theories aside)?
Does anyone besides me find it ludicrous to hear a Google employee asking how to find a PDF on the internet?
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Also, oil companies are some of the ones leading the alternative energy charge, believe it or not.
This reminded me of one Native American method for buffalo hunting:
In this analogy, the oil companies "leading the alternative energy charge" are analogous to the young men getting the herd to follow them. The oil companies lead the charge away from the truly revolutionary breakthroughs, towards business models where they're still relevant.
I met a physicist some 4 years ago who was working on his doctorate, on Cold Fusion-style research. At the time said he'd have to modify one of his papers to acknowledge some tokamak-fusion research that'd just been published - the experiment turned out just like he thought it would, but he had to mention it. Just finished his doctorate a month or two ago...
Scientific revolutions come in waves. Right now we have the old-guard (established energy companies & rogue energy terrorists) fighting to suppress the coming paradigm shift. They'll lose eventually, and we'll all be better off.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Gooclear power!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Yes, the video is indeed about fusion. Yes, people say that fusion is a ways off. Yes, fusion is an ideal power source. Any other gems of wisdom you have to lend?
Materia is made from lifestream! We must blow up the reactors or the planet will die! :)
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Sorry, i don't see what's misleading about that. AFAIK nuclear reactions are not classified by the energy they release or absorb. _That_ would really be misleading.
Ok, you have a point. My answer to the grandparent was a bit too long (his mistake was that he thought that "fusion reaction" was the opposite of "nuclear reaction").
But I wonder what are the examples of fission reactions that can be exactly reverted by a fusion reaction, and vice versa. In these cases, one reaction would be the exact opposite of the other.
There is a tricky issue here. How expensive is oil? Looking at the price of gasoline or the cents per megawatt-hour on your electricity bill doesn't tell you. The reason is that there are many costs that are paid indirectly or paid by all of us. First (and I only wish to tread lightly on this one) is the expense incurred trying to maintain political stability in the Middle East while swamping corrupt goverments with oil money. Then there is pollution of the air and water and the longterm effects of CO2 emission. Even trivial things like oil tankers using public roads. Now incorporate all these things into the price of oil. Is it still cheaper than fusion?
I have no idea, but that is the right question to ask.
I believe that he's sincere. It's possible that he's correct. That he is correct, however, is less than 50% probable. I'll believe that the problems he encountered last time will be fixed by scaling. I will expect, however, that new problems will show up.
Scaling up a complex system is rarely simple. I feel that he's over-optimistic.
(That said, given the potential pay-off this might be a worth-while piece of research. I don't need to decide, so I'm not going to. There's a potential high pay-off, and the odds are against success. I'll decide that those two statements are both correct.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Enslave" may be melodramatic, but a Troll moderation is missing the point.
Have you ever been to a zoo? What benefit do we get from a zoo? Would you like to be in a zoo?
Have you seen the people who kill giant apes to make ashtrays out of their hands? Who slash and burn their habitat?
Making no more sense or having no reason why in not a good enough argument to not take the idea seriously - instead start with Cui Bono, and recognize that many many things happen all the time that are senseless when seen logically, yet they still happen.
As for chimps - the point perfect. The nature of a completely logic-based system will be (as in the worst cases of unhealthy humans) to eliminate the possibility of competition for resources.
You need to go through a lot of math to understand if the confinement works. It is easy to make a confinement system work in the first approximation. Then you have to consider all the higher order effects due to field curvature etc. and prove that these are either slow or cancel out. Is this true for his geometry?
Insulation is a red herring. A plasma is a good conductor, and charge will move around and create large currents and electric fields wherever it can. The point made elsewhere that "we know how to make high voltage standoffs" is likewise not really true, because the electric field that can be sustained across a gap depends on the gas and plasma density, and is a lot lower in those conditions than at 1 atm of air.
What ion temperature did he achieve? Until you get to an ion temperature of a few hundred eV, most of the power will be lost to atomic radiation. Until you "burn through" this limit, you do not have a serious contender for a fusion experiment.
Only if it bankrolls charlatans outside their field.
Caught the video, and while I don't have sufficient physics or math to certify what he's talking about, I have been following the plasm fusion field for years and am glad that someone has followed up on the fusor concept.
However one of the things that Dr. Bussard points out is that he is unable to simulate the experiment due to a lack of computational resources, in particular he states that he had one contracter bail in the middle of the contract when he realized that the problem could not be computed on a "reasonable budget" with existing resources.
I think there may be a way around this by using the parallel approach initially setup by Seti and now called 'BOINC'.
Can I suggest that some of the really smart numerics guys take a hard look at the processing model and potential resources available by BOINC to see if it's a sufficiently good fit to apply in order to try simulating some runs, perhaps initially targetting the model (WB6?) that gave the high fusion counts? Can it be done? Because if it can, then it *should* be done.
I know that I'd be willing to switch my BOINC processing cycles over to such a simulation, and I doubt that I'd be alone in doing so. Heck, I'd even be willing to help out on the non-numerical coding end of things...
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ - for reference...
Within minutes, he had pointed out that his reaction did not produce neutrons. He clearly knew this is a key issue. He described the basic geometries of fusion reaction. He made a nice, clear description of the random walk nature of tokomak fields, and why that meant some of the contents would always head for the walls. His explanations involved nice, clear numbers, like how many times the ion should go through the dense region before it collided. This isn't a popular science gloss-over - I am pretty sure you are getting the real deal here. He argued the need for a 1/r-type field to contain the ions, and why this is best done using electrons guided by coils. I have some familiarity with saddle-field ion sources - not the same thing, but similar enough to recognize what he was talking about.
For those of you familiar with Hollywood Science, 11 years of research with a load of failed designs may not seem like an investment. Actually, it showed a lot of steady progress, with many orders of magnitude improvement. The only faintly Hollywood bit was the final experiment, and that rang very true to me. The lab is being shut doown; the apparatus is going into storage. We may get to use it again, we may not. Why not turn the current supply all the way up? You can do it safely enough if you stand behind the filing cabinet. Oops, it fried. Oh well, we got some numbers anyway. Yup, that's what a lot of science is like. It is much slower and less dramatic then you would believe.
The 'wiffle ball' effect is really cute. He is working with plasmas. You have charged stuff zipping about in magnetic and electrostatic fields. Unfortunately, that stuff is itself charged, and because it is moving, it has its own magnetic field. This usually means the plasma can work out within microseconds what it is not supposed to do, and start hosepiping, or wiggling, or whatever it was that it shouldn't. Just occasionally, you can use this self-will to your advantage. The microwave magnetron is an example (particularly cute that he used one inside his experiment to keep the ionization up). Well, I would see that you could concentrale positive ions using negative electrons, but wouldn't they hit each other and neutralize all the time? Well - no they don't, because the electrons will make fast lanes through the slower moving ions.
He had worked on space engines. He is one of the mad atom smashers from the fifties. Okay, let's see how his proposal stacks up in traditional Mad Scientist terms. Usually a good Mad experiment involves at least two of (a) space, (b) H-bombs, (c) superconductivity, and (d) a small country. A mad experiment needs a budget that is a mere 10% of the US annual defence budget/spending of fossil fuels. And, usually there is the requirement for government funding to pay for the bits that won't make a profit. Some biofuel proposals get well into the Mad bracket. This project has clear aims and costs. It is not huge. You can build it. Either it will work or it won't. If it works, then we can put it into ships and conventional power stations. Project Plowshare it ain't.
The only thing I might say against is that this may be just
It would also usher in a new era of mixed drinks, starting with the Pan-Galactic Google Blaster.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have personally operated one of the devices he mentions, a Farnsworth fusor, at a friend's house in Richmond VA. They're not hard to make at all, this friend made it himself, and they don't cost much. He was on rev 3 completely self funded, and getting quite high neutron outputs using deuterium. I saw the neutron counter count, and the fusion itself through a window. We didn't run it long, as we didn't want to make the whole lab radioactive, and as Bussard says, the grid melts. The friend (who may not want his name out there) normally observes via cheap CC tv. Now I have no way to judge if this Bussard guy is rational. His idea sounds fairly good, but I did notice the arm-waving at certain critical points in the presentation (we don't have time...to tell you how this actually works...with math). Question is, does it matter? Do you have to be rational to be onto something good? Where did that scaling of seventh power come from, thin air? Can't answer without making one and trying it, which would in truth cost very little. I DO have the physics background and training to understand this, being something of an old guy myself. It could work, the devil, as always, is in the details which that video didn't provide (perhaps on purpose, there's a telling instruction at the beginning to not ask "classified" questions during the Q&A period). One thing he is for sure dead right about is the problems with trying to do fusion with Maxwellian distributions -- random thermal motions. That'll only fly with gravity confinement and very large mass (eg, the sun). On earth, magnetic confinement of plasma is about the hardest thing to do there is, and the whole time the pesky electrons are giving off photons, wasting your input energy. And if you have too much density of any particular charge, say just positive nuclei, they won't come together. So tokamaks are expensive boondoggles that may indeed do good science sometimes, but as he said, most of the advances in plasma confinement there turned out to be purely empirical lucky guesses, not truly science. I laughed when he talked about the problems of computational modeling in front of programmers with access to what has to be the largest computer network on the planet, along with some of the smartest programmers. Deliberate challenge? The Farnsworth principle is clever, but is not the only non-maxwellian way there is. Consider a crystal of for example B11 oxide (or whatever) that you fire protons at. You only bother to accelerate ones that are going to hit a nuclei to fairly high degree of confidence. By firing single protons, you can find several nuclei, and once you know where three are in a crystal, you know where they all are. Due to having a crystal out there as a target, this defines a "grid" of locations you want to hit, and much more area where shooting protons in there is just a waste. One could focus an image of another Farnsworth invention (I think) eg the shadow mask used in color CRT's or it's moral equivalent. The holes would be a lot smaller and farther apart, that's all. Using the same type of charged particle optics that were used in electron microscopes, only backwards, the image could be reduced to atomic dimensions. This solves all the problems of loss by radiation, confining a plasma, maxwellian waste and so forth. The only trouble is that it cannot scale large, like the power companies want. Once you shoot the crystal, it's hot now, and the atoms are jiggling around too much to reliably hit again. You'd have to have something like a monomolecular layer of crystal on something like cassette tape and step and repeat. Doing the math on this gives you an upper limit of 10 or 20 kw per unit -- you can only move the "tape" so fast, and find out how the crystal is aligned this time so fast. You can't use a huge crystal because of random thermal motions at any practical temperature, so knowing where some of the nuclei are doesn't really tell you with enough precision where all of them are. I am building the above apparatus, and some of th
Oil is NOT in competition with fusion, fission, or any other method of making electricity. The VAST majority of oil goes to fueling cars or making oil products. Oil is only used as a backup power source. Oil's advantage is portability and energy density, not its cost or energy producing potential. You could magically make free energy and it would hardly dent oil profits. Battery technology that could allow a car to either store vastly more electrical energy or that could recharge in a timely manner would be a treat to oil. Cheaper and cleaner energy doesn't harm oil companies. PORTABLE energy is their competition. Even with portable energy alternatives they would still have a substantial market in petrol products.
If anything, cheaper energy might HELP oil companies. The oil refining process is fairly energy intensive. If energy was cheaper the cost to refine oil would be cheaper and they could squeeze a little more profit out of the oil they have.
Cheap energy isn't in competition with oil. We already have energy that is far cheaper then oil. The issue is portability. Oil companies fear better battery technology a hell of a lot more then they fear cheap and green energy.
Maybe they should look for funding from somewhere else...
They know cheap oil is going away...no matter what they say, look at what they are doing, follow the money.
I've been off the grid entirely since 1982, and solar works fine, thanks. This BS of "we need billions more in research" is to keep people from just going with what there is, which works. I don't care how many billions are spent, there is never going to be a magic box you clip to the antenna of your Toyota that makes it burn freely available (hah!) hydrogen, but most people seem to vaguely hold this thought again, as an excuse to not invest in what works already, which of course would make it work better.
One of the last to survive in our celebrity driven society. Well worth a look by any entreprenur with a love of physics from the sound of it. Good luck to the man I say & I look forward to free power for all and an end to global warming. We need more people like him in todays corporate and beurocratic society.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
The Wright Brother's Bike Shop approach is wonderful if you haven't centralized wealth to the point that the modern equivalent of a Wright Brother's Bike Shop is out of the reach of the modern equivalent of the Wright Brothers. Making a few guys like Brin and Page obscenely wealthy isn't the right way create the kind of society that gave rise to mass production of cars, air flight, the transistor, etc.
Seastead this.
This is the most insightful comment I've seen in this discussion so far. I wish I had mod points to give this person. Please do it for me.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Do you actually know something about Bussard or do you just have a lot of attitude?
Did the Navy actually fund him? Did it receive data from him that suggested some advances?
Who has independently examined his setup? Were you involved in the process? Did you hear about it?
The basic science here seems sound, but there is, I'm sure, plenty of detailed reasons things might not work as envisioned with a scaled up reactor.
Having been active in nanotechnology research for the past few years, I can also tell you that irreproducibility, sketchiness, random technical problems and the like is par for the course. Of course, in the end you come up with some sort of reproducible result, but "reproducibility" often means another lab working for a year or two just to figure out all the little details that actually made things work for you. Clean and straightforward does not usually characterize science. The expenditure of lots of money and lots of frustration does.
This Bussard guy maybe old, may be a little senile, may have glossed over the details, and may be obstinate and difficult to deal with, but that doesn't mean that he's not onto something. Instead of asking for $200 million, which is a lot of money by any standard, the thing for him to do is to ask for a few more million a year from Darpa to gain confidence in the current results and look at technical issues with scaling up his designs. Age and senility might be factors in not wishing to take that route, which likely wouldn't see a working reactor before he dies.
In the video he talks about how his plant could produce ethanol. That why he talked about it destroying oil companies.
In the video he talks about how his plant could produce ethanol. That why he talked about it destroying oil companies. Also interestingly enough his plant could eat up all the old nuclear waste from fission plants and produce something that was only radioactive for "40-90 years"
2. Google goes nuclear. Threat muted...
3. Mad scientists Sergey and Larry then release 'Google eGov'.
See, we did learn something from the 'axis of evil'.
His plant can produce heat for the ditillation process. There are a number of other steps that need to be taken care of before that.
The people who peform those steps are all big clients of Big Oil; who is already in complete control of the distribution chain for liquid fuels, whatever they are. They're not only not likely to go anywhere soon, they're likely to get bigger.
KFG
I love it when you see those rich hippies in the valleys complaining about wind power, yet the farmers
dont seam to mind having 1000s of cows walking around, yeah they look pretty in the green distance, but they
make more pollution, eat too much, and shit too much and for little benefit, they require too much energy to put in to
make something usefull, ie food.
Wind turbines only effect the lower layer of winds, its not like they are 2000feet HIGH!!! and besides there are different
types too, the tubular ones. And I thought birds are smart, they wouldnt be so stupid as to constantly die in the blades.
If you are that concerned , then what about all the birds who die when hit by cars or trucks or eaten by feral cats.
If we had 2000watt panels and a small wind generator in EVERY house in a city of 5million, it would save a significant amount
of power. Rich yuppies can do without them and pay 2x $$$ for their delivered power if they dont like the look.
Besides if there are any natural disasters, or loss of grid power, you have at least enough to keep your essentials running.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Now think for a moment -- you're a potential investor with $200M to risk but you don't want to throw your money away. Do you just put up a couple of million to see the thing reproducibly validate the favorable scaling laws without intending to put the rest of the $200M up or without having a pretty good idea that _someone_ is going to bring the system to full scale? Why do you risk your $2M for recreating the demonstrator if not to realize the profit from the full scale system?
Seastead this.
Here are two of Bussards posts, and the two patents he mentions:5 007961e36e93001813d66ec9a4ea&p=1722023 = fusor_announce&key=1143684406 T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5160695.PN.&OS=PN/51606 95&RS=PN/5160695 T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4826646.PN.&OS=PN/48266 46&RS=PN/4826646
http://www.randi.org/forumlive/showpost.php?s=e66
http://www.fusor.net/board/view.php?site=fusor&bn
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
Everything he says is consistent with what he has said elsewhere. Furthermore, all the details are correct to the extent of my knowledge (though this isn't the same branch of physics I specialised in).
The only thing I notice to be a little offsetting is: his disdain for government funding, oil companies, and his exaggeration of how great this will be for the world. But some folks are like that; this is perhaps the sort of thinking you should keep to yourself when trying to convince others of the veracity of your claims! All the same, it has no bearing on the rigour or ration of his work. (He even recognises that this sounds like "sour grapes", but that this isn't his intention.)
So I expect this to be on the up-and-up, though an insurmountable obstacle may well still pop up. That isn't the sort of thing I would expect to be mentioned to potential funders!
This project, probably Focus Fusion if I read the tealeaves right without even seeing the videos
It's not - well maybe it is if you think alpha-particle beam rather than proton, however it still may not be as you know it.
It is worth watching, in part because it _isn't_ Farnsworth Fusor all over again (and he goes into why Farnsworth won't work as well as damning Tokamak).
According to the video, this guy's R&D team have been on this for over a decade with a US Navy grant + publication embargo - but their grant was killed so now they can talk.
They started at Farnsworth, figured that grid-impact losses made it a non-starter and took away the grid, using a new take on magnetic confinement (polyhedral / psuedo-spherical) of injected high energy electrons to create the potential well.
They claim to have got to several orders of magnitude better than Farnsworth devices, and only a couple short of breakeven. Very interesting. Might still be snake oil, but Farnsworth isn't snake oil (just never going to get to breakeven) and this does sound like a plausible research avenue for a way to fix the losses with Farnsworth devices.
Video is very amusing in places - particularly some of the bits about Tokamak / Jet / ITER. To paraphrase one quote (because I can't be bothered to seek through the whole video again): "we know fusion works, go outside look up in the night sky, billions of working fusion reactors... none of them toroidal". Sweet - I'm going to remember that one.
I watched the video as well, and agree. He wasn't making threats. Dr. Bussard was pleading that the opportunity not be lost by the US. He believes it is promising enough that his work will be built upon and completed by someone in the world. In spite of the problems with the American empire, there are many countries with the resources to do this fusion work that I would not want to see in a dominant economic position in the world. All it would take is a 15 year monopoly in a working version of this technology to basically own the world economy.
While I watched it the video early this morning, I clearly remember him stating that while the physics side of the work was almost done, the engineering challenges would take at least 10x the money to solve - I think he actually said that proving the physics is the easy part. Unlike the slur in the grandparent post, Dr. Bussard did not in any way dismiss the engineering challenges that remain.
If he were selling 80% of the company for $200 million, I'd put $5k into purchasing shares (to get 0.002% of the company). I'm not rich, but it has an attractive risk/reward ratio, and while losing $5k would suck, it wouldn't break me. All Dr. Bussard needs to do now is find 40,000 other people like me, but as he said, he's tired.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
They should stop doing evil: Fix their groups design which is totally awfull and remove all that imbedded stylesheet and javascript crap on the search engine!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
And yet, I can not help but think of the original monopoly in the oil world, MS, and even the tabbacco industry.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
after watching the presentation and following that with reading some comments i realised how pathetic they are compared to this persons idea and long years he put into this project cannot be wiped out by a number of idiots. oh yes, i personally attack most of your absolutely stupid idiots and i call you what you are.
on the other note, i agree that a global effort to calculate/simulate an experiment on the large number of computers across the world is a good idea and he should probably look into that while they are looking for funding. the idea is brilliant, and the cause is good. i dont think he over-exaggerated the impact of the device, once its ready. in fact it could go a lot further than what he mentioned, but of course its a fantasy/speculation at this point.
cheap energy could help us with most of the problems that we have right now except for one , and i'll repeat other persons argument here to some extent:
if mr. bussard figured out how to get rid of all morons(interpretations vary), then we would not have problems that we have right now. we would have a lot bigger problems caused by morons that got rid of others.
he is right about the rice bowl. the budget of DOE is way over-blown for how much output they have realistically produced in the field and he deserves a chance. there is a fat layer of bureocrats, that would not want to leave their cushy spots, where they dont do anything, except making stupid decisions and play golf. its like that in any goverment project, thats funded above their necks. i think this guy deserves funding, and if google funds him, well its great for google.
This is dumb. Enough cheap energy, and yes you can.
I get pissed at the fools always talking about a looming water crisis. Bullshit... we have an energy crisis. Get enough of that, and desalinization is trivial. Same thing here.
Check this: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33 227017.pdf
The paper appears to shoot down any chance of an IEC fusion reactor producing useful energy outputs. This paper has been around for a while and is one reason why so few people are interested in IEC (or similar systems) these days. I'm not qualified to follow the scientific argument, but I'd love to know whether Dr. Bussard can answer it.
A friend and I (we both know our nuclear physics) watched the theoretical section in the beginning, pausing at every tricky spot to analyze the details, and decided that the theory is sound.
One particular advantage this device has over the JET/ITER designs is that it immediately accelerates all nuclei to the energy level (some 500 keV) needed for fusion. The torus designs heat a lot of nuclei to a level where the fastest nuclei reach this level and have a reasonable probability of colliding. That takes a lot more energy and engineering to hold such great amounts of plasma.
The pure beauty of his approach using a static electric field to both accelerate the ions and keep the plasma in confinement already makes this a work of art - even if it would turn out not to be commercially viable for whatever reason.
As for him just giving up on funding, I give him the benefit of doubt. He's a scientist, not a fundraiser, and it's hard to convince bureaucrats to do anything risky. He's delivered the science, the prototypes and has described it in patents. Now it's up to someone else to pick up the lead and continue into the real engineering of his. It's true that the Iraq war eats up budgets like crazy (that war might qualify for the 'Stupidity of the Century' award, once we get that far). It also delayed reinforcement of the New Orleans dikes.
MeThinks that either some corporate investor (Google is not a bad idea) or some non-US country will pick this up and do the practical work. $200 million is peanuts in this context. It's what you'll pay for a new stretch of motorway, a large concert hall, ship or whatever the local or federal government decides to build this week. Even if there was just one in a hundred % chance that this will work, it should be tried and tested.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
And learn to accept other opinions than your own.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I think that what Bussard is proposing is not ethanol from fermentation, but direct synthesis from CO2 and H2O or similar. Very energy intensive I imagine...
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
I think that what Bussard is proposing is not ethanol from fermentation, but direct synthesis from CO2 and H2O or similar.
Is that what he's on about (I couldn't play the video and didn't see anything like that in the text I hunted up)?
Interesting. Yeah, it can be done. Yeah, it's very energy intensive. One of the places the energy needs to go is into the production of the appropriate catalysts. That's a place where oil is likely to rule the roost until it is effectively gone.
We're also likely to need to buy the raw materials/elements.
Oil independence is not the same thing as energy independence. If we can give up buying oil from Mexico and Saudi Arabia, what have we really gained if that is replaced with buying boron and platinum from Turkey and Russia?
Look below the surface hype. Where Big Oil is likely to take a loss someone else is likely to make a gain. Just because they're not oil doesn't mean they aren't manipulating image for their own benefit. They may well be planning on making their savior's halo with gold coins filched from your own pocket.
Some of them are even likely to be Big Oil wearing a false mustache.
Things are not as they appear.
KFG
I was basing my post on earlier reading about Bussard. I have now been able to watch the video.
From the video he is apparently talking about fermentation from cane sugar, using the fusion plant for processing. Oops on my part. You are right about one thing, Bussard is waaaay too optimistic about the economic results of a working reactor. I think he has been stuck in a lab too long to see how the world works (outside of government R&D funds that is...)
Numbers from the video: 6000 tons ethanol/day/30 "mile square" cane fields (30 miles^2 or 30*30 miles^2??) big difference. If it is the smaller number then we need 52,000 square miles of cane fields to match world oil consumption. the larger figure - Brazil might be big enough...
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
I've not seen any electric "jet" engines yet, have you ?
And as safe as they look on the ground, I'm not sure about smahing these reactors into the ground a few times a year.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Really? Shame you did not have a couple of minutes to back that one up.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Interesting audience... the women are where?
You shouldn't assume Google hasn't hired women. Perhaps they all quit after working for a while surrounded by nerds!
But I found the video fascinating and compelling. Dr. Bussard was every bit as interesting as I imagined him to be. This is The Guy whose name I read in the Larry Niven story about a guy traveling through the Galaxy at near-lightspeed in a Bussard Ramjet.
So why are people walking out as the video goes on? Firstly I wonder how these young guys have such weak bladders, and how much coffee and energy drinks they consume, but later the video shows the audience with EMPTY SEATS! I hope it's because they really had to report back to work, perhaps for a meeting, rather than getting bored with the talk.
Now I'm really wanting to work for Google just to be able to see their speakers.
Tag lost or not installed.
A friend asked me to comment on the video, and I posted extensive comments here: Clean, cheap, nuclear power: Should Google go nuclear?
But be warned: This web page is not only uncited, it is no longer on the web outside of the archive.
Seastead this.